A slow test suite can put a damper on test-driven development. In this episode I show a variety of ways to optimize specs including: selective testing, preloading Rails, and testing outside of Rails.
(17 minutes)

PhantomJS allows us to test JavaScript without going through a browser window. Here I show how to do this using Capybara and Poltergeist. I also give some tips on handling database transactions and skipping javascript tests.
(10 minutes)

Trinidad is designed to serve JRuby web applications and gives you the power of Java while still keeping the feel of traditional Rails deployment. Here I show how to setup a Capistrano recipe, configure it, and more.
(15 minutes)

This episode builds on last week's episodes and shows how to integrate Facebook further through the Open Graph protocol. You will also learn how to tunnel your local server and move Facebook communication into a background process.
(11 minutes)

Meteor is a JavaScript framework for building rich client-side applications. Here I re-create the Raffler app to compare with Backbone.js and Rails. Meteor may not be related to Rails, but I think many will find it interesting.
(15 minutes)

With hstore you can add schema-less data to PostgreSQL. This allows you to store model attributes without creating separate database columns. Watch how to do this using the activerecord-postgres-hstore gem.
(10 minutes)